The Challenge....Revisited.

It was 17 days ago. That's when I posted about my scrappy spending freeze challenge. Friday night I sat in my studio, feeling quite defeated. I wanted to scrap. I was out of new pics. So, I decided to tackle the layout of Scott's year as Cole's assistant ball coach, that Scott has not-so-patiently been waiting for.

There's still a ton of cardstock and patterned paper. Not one scrap of it would work. It was either the wrong colour, wrong pattern or wrong dimension. None of my inks, paints or mists could sufficiently alter any of it. Every idea I came up with to "make it work" just did not make me happy. They all felt like too much of a compromise.

I later shared my disappointing news with Scott. He simply told me, "I guess we'll have to get you out for some scrapbook shopping this week."

Huh? "But I'm on a spending freeze." I argued. "I feel bad. There's still so much stuff up there!"

"You told me you weren't going to buy any more until you'd used up what you could of what you had. Obviously, you've used up what you can."

Normally, I would have argued this point further. But truth be told, he was right in this instance and the only thought I had was how I really needed to learn to think more like a guy sometimes.

"Well," I thought outloud, "maybe I've got so much stuff because I need to do a better job purging out the old stuff I'll never use."

Silence. That's code for "You got it!" Ok, sometimes it's code for, "I'm giving up on this because you're going to argue no matter what I say" but this time I'm pretty sure it was the first option.

So, does this mean failure? I'm not sure. I spent 17 days without even feeling the need to purchase any scrappy items and in that same time created roughly 5 layouts (I never thought to keep count). That's pretty good. And there's still future layouts I could easily make with the supplies I have on hand. The stuff I want to keep. That's good too.

But baseball layouts? No. And with both kids playing ball this year, I will at least need more paper to work with.

I'm not saying I've given up completely on my challenge. It just needs a bit of a reassessment. My studio needs a serious purge. I need to be making mindful purchases, such as individual sheets of patterned paper I love, over kits that I will tire of before they're used up. I also need to cut myself a little slack when the deal of the day sites all get it right at the same time and allow me to stock up on the basics for cheap.

So I'm going to stop calling it a spending freeze. Instead, I'll call it mindful spending and it will no longer be a timed challenge, but an ongoing effort. Anyways, being consistently diligent in my spending and using up of scrapbooking supplies will get me a lot further in the long run than short spurts of freezing my spending.
In theory, anyways!